From: Heather Morrison <[log in to unmask]> Date: Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:48:46 -0700 With open access policy under discussion in the US and the UK, this might be a good time to ask whether something like the "media messaging" recommended by the "pit bull of public relations" to representatives of Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society in 2006 is underfoot. As reported by Jim Giles in Nature: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v445/n7126/full/445347a.html Some of Dezenhall's advice: "The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as "Public access equals government censorship". He hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review, and "paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles". The latter suggests the kind of strategy behind the NYT article - paint the open access world as equated with low quality. I wonder if anyone at the NYT would be interested in doing some digging to find out where the ideas for this article came from? This might make for an interesting investigation! Note that the article brings up a very real problem - pseudo conferences and predatory journals - but falsely equates this with open access publishing. As Michael Eisen commented on his blogpost, connecting these operations with PLoS is like blaming NYT for people who sell fake newspapers door to door. http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1354 best, Dr. Heather Morrison Librarian, academic & open access activist The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com